Tag: MandarinBanana

Today I’ve created a text file with the mnemonics from mandarinbanana.com to import in Anki. You can download the file here:

It is a tab-separated text file (compressed as zip, because it is 45 MB large uncompressed). This is what the import looks like:

# / name	What’s inside
1 / hanzi	Just a single Chinese character, no HTML formatting. Example: 仍
2 / components	A simple line showing the components (example: 仍 = 乃 + 亻), followed by dictionary entries for the components and mnemonics for the components.
3 / translations	Dictionary entries for the character and any mnemonics associated with the character.
4 / images	Links to the comics associated with the character (no download option available so far)
5 / appearances	A list of characters which use the root character as component (example: 仍 appears in 芿)
6 / subtitles	Subtitles of the movies on mandarinbanana.com which contain the character. If you click on the sentence, it will open in the browser.
7 / words	A list of CC-CEDICT dictionary entries for words the character appears in.

There’s a lot of HTML formatting inside. Here’s what my styling section in Anki looks like (just as an example):

.card {
 font-size: 16px;
 text-align: center;
 background: black;
 color: white;
}

.mnemonics {
  margin-top: 1em;
  padding-top: 1em;
  border-top: 1px solid gray;
}

table {
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
}

td {
  border: 1px solid;
  padding: 5px;
}

div {
  margin: 5px;
}

.hanzi {
font-size: 2em;
font-family: "zenhei";
}

a {
text-decoration: none;
color: inherit;
}

ul {
  list-style-type: none;
}

.mandarinbananalink a {
text-decoration: none;
color: orange;
}

img.mimage {
width: 200px;
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid white;
margin: 1px;
}

@font-face {
  font-family: uming;
  src: url('_UMingCN.ttf');
}

@font-face {
  font-family: simfang;
  src: url('_simfang.ttf');
}

@font-face {
 font-family: zenhei;
 src: url('_WenQuanYiZenHei.ttf');
}

.color1 {
color: orangered;
}

.color2 {
color: yellow;
}

.color3 {
color: limegreen;
}

.color4 {
color: dodgerblue;
}

Each mnemonic is followed by the author’s name (since all mnemonics are CC-BY). If you like to, you can hide this information by including the following code in your “Styling” section:

.authorattribution {
display: none;
}

I hope this is useful for you! If you need a different format let me know in the comments.

If you want to have a look how the file is generated, please head over to https://github.com/mattbenscho/MandarinBanana/blob/master/lib/tasks/output_anki.rake. It takes a few minutes for the script to run because there are so many database calls, which makes it difficult to, for example, post a link on mandarinbanana.com which always returns the latest collection. I’ll have to implement some caching mechanism first, but it’s one of the things I definitely want to do to complete the site.

Have fun learning Chinese!

Copyright information: all mnemonics CC-BY by the respective authors. Dictionary entries: CC-SA CC-CEDICT (www.mdbg.com).